


In the middle of a black sea

by NL7



Category: League of Legends RPF
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Holding Hands, Hugs, Hurt/Comfort, Industries of Titan AU, M/M, Rebels, Space Colony, Spaceships, alternative universe, you don't actually need to know the video game to understand the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:00:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25472020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NL7/pseuds/NL7
Summary: "Okay- okay fine, I just wanted to hear your voice. They're coming in, like, twenty minutes. There's time, I'm not risking anything, Jesus, Miky..."Miky represses a small laugh at Perkz’s sulky tone. His eyes instinctively look in the scenery and end up focusing on the turret next to the storage facility B."If those are your last words...", he teases."They won't be."––––––––---Or: Perkz has to defend the City against the rebels. Miky's heart lurches in his throat when the rebels aim for the turret Perkz is in.(Based on the video game 'Industries of Titan'.)
Relationships: Mihael "Mikyx" Mehle & Luka "Perkz" Perković, Mihael "Mikyx" Mehle/Luka "PerkZ" Perković
Kudos: 23





	In the middle of a black sea

The steady hum of the engines resonates through the walls, like the purr of a well-oiled machine. The metal walls and the reinforced concrete of the building muffle most of the external commotion, but nothing can suppress the dull noises that his steps make against the tiles. 

Miky is walking towards the exit when the ceiling lamps start to turn off.

One after the other, the light bulbs flicker then turn to darkness. 

Miky hurries. Just as he touches the door handle, the last lamp turns off. He makes a face, pushes the thick door with his shoulder and lets out a sigh of relief when it yields. The door shuts behind him with a hiss. A few seconds, and a small click is heard. 

Miky moves forward.

It’s not the first time he witnesses it, but the process never fails to impress him.

Around him, the City stretches. Abrupt vastness, architecture blending sharp angles and neon madness. The buildings are distinct; he recognizes easily the ugly cubes of the factories, the warm colors of the advertisement offices, the chiseled white of the Council monuments, the gray-black curve of the fuel refineries, the yellow structures of the storage facilities…  
And then, at the center of the City: the Headquarters.  
The first building to have been raised on Titan. The roots of the City, the source of all of the orders and all of the decisions – affiliated to the Council, a governmental branch whose authority takes precedence over the colonists in charge of the administration of the City.

(There is the Council, the colonists, the citizens, and far at the bottom of the ladder, the employees. Although sometimes, when he watches the citizens kill off their brain cells in front of pre-roll advertisements all day long only to obtain a meager wage, Miky tells himself that he may not be as much at the bottom of the ladder as they try to make him believe.)

Miky puts his hands on the railing that runs along the edge. Behind him, the neon-blue bars swarming with energy that constantly spin at the top of the power plant begin to slow down. Soon, the complicated structures stand still, and the splendid blue dulls before completely fading away in the darkness. All the other districts suffer the same fate, one by one. The dark falls like a cloak on the City, engulfing every nook and cranny in its embrace. The angles disappear under the heavy gloomy sky.

It looks like a ghost town.

And the sudden silence makes Miky nervous. 

No noise whatsoever, except for the faint clicking of boots and footsteps in the distance. Everything is at a standstill. Usually the fuel refineries and the power plants keep on working during the blackout, but this time the colonists decided to empty the tremendous batteries of the City – as they always do once a year, for safety reasons. So, the silence is weird. Unusual.

Then all of a sudden the engines wake up. Alone, the Headquarters light up once again like an illuminated core, along with the small command centers that Miky can glimpse at the edges of the town. And, spread across the City, monstrous creaking creatures looking terrifying in the darkness…

The turrets boot up.

About twenty meters high, they raise their head simultaneously. Their circuits crackle with pale blue and ocher as energy rushes in in a way it hasn’t for months. With a lump in his throat, Miky watches those gigantic rectangular heads find their bearings, bending from left to right as if reconnoitering, before settling on alert. The amount of energy needed to set those monsters in motion is astonishing – so much that in order to drag them out of their slumber, the City has to be turned off. 

It’s scary to see those structures so tall, so imposing and so threatening with their automatic surveillance system. At the very beginning, shortly after his arrival on Titan, Miky used to have nightmares about them. He just couldn’t get out of his mind the turrets’ haunting firepower and their unwavering aura of destruction. 

Miky exhales, removes his fingers from the frozen railing. The climate is not welcoming at all here and sometimes, since his mutation into employee, he forgets it a little. Stepping away from the edge of the footbridge, he’s about to continue on his way towards one of the factories when his radio crackles.

Frowning slightly, he picks up.

_"Miky, can you hear me?"_

"Yeah, I can hear you. What do you need?" 

Silence answers him.

Miky huffs out a laugh, halfway between exasperation and amusement as he pictures the other trying to find a valid answer.

"Hello?" 

_"Yeah yeah, just-"_

"You know you're not supposed to call when you're on duty unless it's for an emergency, Luka." 

_"Okay- okay fine, I just wanted to hear your voice. They're coming in, like, twenty minutes. There's time, I'm not risking anything, Jesus, Miky..."_

Miky represses a small laugh at Perkz’s sulky tone. His eyes instinctively look in the scenery and end up focusing on the turret next to the storage facility B.

"If those are your last words...", he teases.

 _"They won't be."_

There is pure determination in this promise, this typical stubbornness from Perkz that others see as arrogance. Miky smiles. He’s slowly walking towards the factory, but he doesn’t quite know anymore if he really wants to get there.

(Objectively, he knows that he will be safer there and that it’s the closest spot to get back to his job afterwards.)

(Subjectively, it’s another thing.)

 _"Are you still there?"_

"Yeah." 

_"Cool."_

Miky lets his eyes return to the turret.

"How is it, up there?" 

_"Man, it's fucking cold."_

Miky chuckles. The radio stays quiet for a few moments. He can easily imagine Perkz’s grin on the other side, pleased that he made him laugh. And then the radio crackles and Perkz’s voice is more serious, calmer, softer.

 _"It's high. And the view is pretty. The whole City is dark, you know? So it kind of feels like… like I'm in a lighthouse, in the middle of a black sea."_

Miky thinks about it.

"Sounds lonely," he murmurs.

The radio falls silent.

Dark clouds of methane are tapering off above. In the distance, very far away, even the huge incinerators are switched off. No thick smoke, nothing. It’s strangely quiet, even with the irregular metallic whirring roll of the turrets, keeping a close watch on the sky. 

_"I have to go. See you later, Miky."_

"Okay, bye." 

His radio finds its place back to his belt. 

And the quiet doesn’t stay quiet very long.

It begins with a dreadful throb, followed by the frantic arrival of the spaceships responsible for the havoc. The rebels are closing in on the City, their cannons aimed at the HQ and the exposed areas, with the same desire to destroy that they have been vigorously showing for years. For if the Council arbitrarily decided to colonize Titan a long time ago, it has however taken them several attempts to succeed. Several failures – among which the last one, that ended in the employees’ revolt before this whole City was built. The fight was rough, messy. A bloodbath, as the Council quashed them. Furious, the rebels seized technologies and hid away in the depths of Titan, giving the colonists a hard time ever since.  
Miky doesn’t pretend to understand the rebels. But it still annoys him a lot to see them turn up with their ships, open fire on the City and threaten the lives of countless innocents. 

The thing in all of this…

… it’s that the City retaliates. 

The turrets target the three spaceships that hovering above the town. Then, with their ugly head staring at the rebels… 

They fire. Thick bursts of energy decimate the intruders, causing considerable damage, burning and seeking to shoot them down without further ado. 

The backlash of such an astounding firepower is that it takes time to reload. And while the turrets glare at them with their empty eye, the rebels fire back. Already badly messed up, their ships won’t manage to fully destroy a single turret. But it doesn’t take much to set it on fire – doesn’t take much to aim at the human beings who are handling the controls at the top of the turrets. 

Miky slips into the factory before he can overthink this.

Inside, he ignores the citizens who are huddling in the dorms with worried faces, he ignores the employees who are pacing back and forth to busy themselves.

Pressed against the window, he watches the fight. A spaceship crashes to the ground, near the advertisement office A, the following tremors making Miky shudder. The turrets do their utmost to knock the two other ships out, but the rebels have enough time to pelt them as they like before one of them eventually bites the dust in the district of the Council representatives. Miky tries hard to not think about the death toll, tries hard to not look for which turret has suffered the most damage. 

The rebels’ last spaceship turns around. Limping, seriously scorched, its reactors struggling to propel it. 

It won’t get far.

Miky’s fingers curl up against his thigh, his leg nervously twitching. The dark in which the factory is immersed doesn’t help him to calm down. The not-quite-silence, that he used to find almost pleasant, now gets on his nerves a little bit more each extra minute his radio keeps quiet.

Unable to take it anymore, Miky walks back out of the factory without sparing a glance at the others. He’s supposed to stay inside until the alarm rings, but…

Outside, heavy clouds of smoke rise from the crash areas. The Headquarters and the command centers’ light has trouble breaking through the fog. No sign of the rebels. The turrets slowly bob their head, whirring. Some of them nod one last time before folding away, retracting into the ground. The others are either keeping watch or will need to be repaired later.

Mutely, Miky searches the horizon, on the look out for the shape of the storage facility B behind the cloud of smoke. A few minutes later, the cloud finally disperses, blown by the wind.

The turret hasn’t been left unharmed.

The side of its long neck is covered with soot and filthy traces of explosion. At the top, the triple-glazed window has been smashed to pieces. There is no fire to be seen, but the lights are off and the sight of it all is utterly bloodcurdling. 

Miky curses, a million of nightmare scenarios crossing his mind. He scrutinizes the hole where there used to be a large window, hopes for even the slightest noise, the slightest movement.

But the turret is still. No wary grinding noise from its head, no fold from its thick body. 

_Dead silent._

Miky picks up his radio.

"Are you there?" 

…

"Luka, are you there?" 

His steps stagger before speeding up, leading him to the turret.

"Answer if you can, please." 

…

"… Luka…" 

He’s panting, maintaining his running at a superhuman pace. The terminal fixed on his arm makes an absurdly cheerful ring. As usual, they have probably assigned him a task to help revive the City.

He ignores it.

But when he reaches the bottom of the massive tower, when he moves his nerve-racked hands closer to the front panel to unlock the door, the realization falls like a cold shower. 

The access to the turret asks for credentials that he doesn’t have.

His breathing becomes erratic. His chest tightens with anxiety. Idiot, he’s such an idiot. He should have thought twice about it– should have known he wouldn’t be able to do anything, should have followed the orders and done his _damn_ job, should have waited for the news like any normal employee– but panic took hold of him, and now he can think about only one thing… 

The shattered window of the control room at the top of the turret.

The radio slips between his hands clammy from cold sweat.

"God fucking–" 

"You called?" 

Miky freezes.

The voice is drawling, casual. The joke, in terrible taste. And the teasing tone that lets wondering awe show through…?

Miky turns his head, radio still clutched in his hands. There, intensely staring at him, Perkz is leaning against the frame of the door now open. Shards of glass left thin blood-red slits on his arms. His clothes are crumpled but in one piece, except for the dust sticking to his pants. There are bits and pieces of grayish plaster in his tousled hair. His face is perfectly sound, as if he had instinctively protected his head between his arms during the explosion. 

He looks tired, weary, but he’s alive.

"You _douche bag."_

Miky’s voice breaks.

A worried expression immediately takes place on Perkz’s face, who scrutinizes Miky as if he were physically hurt. Unable to see anything unusual other than his ragged breathing, Perkz looks at him, confused.

"I– I tried calling you but you wouldn't answer, and with the explosion I thought– I thought–" 

Miky bites his lower lip, folds his arms and tightens his grip as if it could help him to protect himself from his own emotions.

“Oh.” Perkz straightens up, takes a few steps forward. "Fuck, I'm sorry Miky. My radio died in the explosion, so, yeah, I couldn't..." 

He looks genuinely sorry. Miky kind of wants to hit him a bit and really wants to kiss him a lot. He does neither, too busy swallowing his tears of fear and relief, too busy taking deep breaths. 

Perkz comes closer and softly touches his elbow. 

"I'm fine. See?" 

Nodding, Miky sinks his teeth into his lip to focus on those words. Perkz’s hand goes up to his shoulder, and soon, he’s wrapping his arms around him. Miky lets out a shaking breath. For a minute…

For a minute, he really thought he had lost him. 

"I'm okay. You're okay." 

Miky breathes in his familiar smell. Perkz’s whole body is pressed up against his, heartbeat pulsing at the tip of his fingers, a constant reminder. Panic fades away as Miky settles down a little bit more each time he exhales. Perkz’s fingers run along his nape. Miky shivers.

Soon, way too soon, Perkz steps away. Miky almost stretches to catch him again, automatically, but he holds himself back at the last moment. Perkz points at the Headquarters.

"Look. They're turning everything back on." 

While he observes the employees who are turning everything back on, the windows lighting up and the citizens starting to come and go again, Miky forgets about his anxiety.

Perkz quietly takes his hand.

He’s perfectly fine, despite the lot of scratches on his arms at which Miky will have to take a closer look later.

The City is waking up.

Miky squeezes Perkz’s hand.

Perkz squeezes back, giving him a relaxed grin.

And the turrets fall asleep.


End file.
